Control

One of my favorite parts about my life in Telavi has been watching the evolution of computer availability with my host siblings. When the weather started to turn cold, and the kids were inside more often, they naturally began to fight over the computer. They'd fight when they got home from school, and would barrel through their homework to be the first done and secure their spot on the computer for that precious hour they [each] get. It's really incredible what flash games and Facebook will do to a sibling relationship.

Most of the vicious fights happened when it was just the two of them in the mornings before school. No one ever truly won - someone would get kicked too hard, punched too much, or in one extreme case, where Goga threw a pair of Ani's favorite pants out the back door and into the weird trash filled creek that flows behind our house, be fed up with Georgian boy shit. Their fighting would be so voracious and frequent that eventually my host mother, tired of hearing about these escapades from the wronged child day in and day out, put a password on the whole computer. That way, she would have to be home in order for them to be able to use the computer. In her mind, she was eliminating a huge aggravator from everyone's life.

Unfortunately, what this introduced was an almost blood frenzy of Internet induced angst from my siblings. Now they'd just harangue her even more the second they were ready to go online, not caring about where she was in the house, what she was doing, or who she was talking to. She'd try to hide her keystrokes, but since the passwords were like four characters long and the kids would raptor pack her (standing on opposite sides of her, with one being a distraction and the other watching diligently for what she was typing) they would figure each one out. But she wouldn't know they had figured it out until the next time they would get in a fight over the computer in the morning and the "loser" would complain to her. 

Then she started to hide the keyboard, under the assumption that if they couldn't type they wouldn't be able to log on. Which is pretty sound logic, honestly, but they're determined kids when they want to be. They found that pesky Special Assistance menu that's on Windows log in screens, which brings up a virtual keyboard. Using the mouse, they were able to select the letters needed for the super simple password. And again, they could have gotten away with this, if only they had shut the fuck up and cooperated and taken turns. But no. Shit fests ensued in the mornings again, and word finally got back to my host moms ears. Naturally she started to hide the mouse, also. 

It began in a drawer in the desk, but Ani and Goga quickly found this hiding spot. Then my mom moved them into a cabinet in the living room, changing what one she'd use every day and always hiding them underneath bedding and towels. That didn't help, either, and inevitably they'd find these peripherals and then use them when she wasn't home. Finally she just started to bring the mouse and keyboard with her to school. It was the solution she had been dreaming of! Divine retribution at last! Freedom from quarreling children always! I mean, it's a bit cumbersome having to carry a full size keyboard and a mouse in her purse day in and day out, but if it saves her a headache or twelve per week it's totally worth it.

So there I was a few weeks ago, sitting on the couch in the petchie room, reading my book. My host brother had just thrown a fit about not being able to use the computer, and stomped out of the room, leaving only my host mom and me. She waits a moment. We hear the bathroom door close, and then she hurriedly comes over to where I am and motions for me to stand up. I look at her curiously, but comply and stand by the door. "Watch for Goga," she whispers as she lifts up the cushions and pulls out the keyboard and mouse from the empty space underneath the collapsable couch bed. Of course I start busting up, because this women just pulled computer accessories out from a sofa with the same caution that someone might have when revealing the location of the hidden rebel base to a confidant. 

And that's the current resting location of the peripherals. Right under my butt as I type this up. My host siblings have yet to discover it, that's how unASSuming (RIMSHOT) it is. I've started to run interference on the kids, keeping them out of the room and occupied so my mom can safely extract the secret devices. The suspense of having the keyboard and mouse magically appear is starting to drive my host siblings insane. They keep asking me if I know where it is, but I always just play dumb and lie. Their incessant fighting makes me want to strangle both of them, and I am pretty sure my host mom is in the same boat as I am, considering she always sighs and yells that she will abandon them and come back to America with me if they keep fighting. So if they want to pull their hair out in wonder as to where the accessories are, let them!

Besides, I've got my own computer, and my own Internet, and I can do shit like this.

Since you need a nice view in order to just look at pictures of cats, right?

Cold

Sometimes I make the very silly mistake of thinking that I look awesome.

This usually happens in the mornings, and it's usually following about a twenty minute long string of obscenities going through my head about how much I don't want to get out of bed, because outside of bed is the air known as "cold." It happens after I've stumbled to my dresser, pulled a skirt on over the long underwear I slept in, thrown a sweater over the top half of my long underwear ensemble, and then hiked up my super toasty wool socks over the long underwear bottoms - you know, so snow can't get all up in my business. Once I throw on my goober boots, I feel like one of those chic Norwegian women who always are all playful and cute in the snow. The ones who have the perfect hair and they're just loving every second of their polar afternoon because hey, they're in this super cute long underwear and pairing it with clothes and don't they look so comfortable and fashionable? They're the ones who don every winter style magazine cover, and who can make even the winteriest of the boots look good.

So as I've got this mental image of me being a super cute Swedish snow bunny in my mind (which I'm not remotely of Nordic descent, but we'll just skip right over that detail), I will, without fail, just happen to glance in the mirror on my way out the door. It's always far too late to do anything about my clothing, as I inevitably do not leave for school until the VERY last second, but I'm still always slightly horrified by the person staring back at me.

With my hood up, my look would not be considered "Norwegian Arctic Fashionista," and would instead fall into the category of "Homeless Eskimo Yooper Chic."

This is always kind of embarrassing, given how well put together everyone looks here. Women still wear very cute little boots with absolutely zero traction, and most have traded in their stilettos for the much more "practical" wedge heel. They wear sheer black tights underneath their adorable dresses, and have very black classy jackets. Their faces as they pass me in the street say, "Dear mother of tits, it is cold as all get up outside!"

And then there's me. Being all Yooper about shit. Stomping down the street with bright blue wool socks peeping over the top of my fuchsia lined stompy boots (seriously, these Columbia boots are fucking awesome), wearing my long underwear on the outside for everyone to see. My jacket is super poofy. My scarf extraordinarily fluffy. And guess what? I'm pretty warm!

The previously mentioned embarrassment of how I look always dissipates the second I see any other human being on the road, which usually means it's gone about two minutes after I step foot outside of the door. I see people sliding around on the snow because they might as well have smooth plastic trays strapped to their feet. There are folks walking in tandem clutching each other as they go so they can share body heat. The smugness I feel as I stroll on by, not slipping because my big ol' stompy boots have a crazy little thing called traction, only helps to make me warmer. It's an internal heat that starts to spread and it feels about as warm as the sunlight does on those cold winter days. I could try to dress all fashionable, but fashionable isn't warm. Fashionable will just make me cranky and cold and quite frankly that sounds just awful.

I used to be really good with the cold. I used to love winters. I used to go snowboarding with no jacket, doing runs in only a t-shirt and my snowpants, because I just didn't feel the cold. I was from upper Michigan, dammit. Lake Superior itself flowed in my veins, and that six month dead period we call winter couldn't touch me or bring me down.  And then somewhere along the way I became a wuss. Cold started to affect me. There would be a breeze on a 70 degree day and I would shiver like some simpering Floridian retiree. If it wasn't 75 degrees and sunny, I contemplated wearing a hoodie because it might get chilly, and wouldn't that be unpleasant? Living in California, where the coldest it would get is in the 40s (HA. Scare me later!), certainly didn't help, nor did my short stint in Texas. I complained if it wasn't warm enough in a house to wear only a t-shirt, and I wanted to be able to walk around barefoot regardless of the time of year and location.

My parents would keep the house at a frigid 58 degrees in the winter, letting it drop down to 55 at night. Sometimes we'd get crazy, and "crank" the heat to a balmy 62, but for the most part my folks were of the opinion that if you're cold put another "god damn shirt on." I used to think this was outrageous. I used to think it had to be some sort of child abuse. I mean, who are these fucking eskimo people that raised me? Who thinks that 58 degrees is an acceptable inside ambient temperature? Where is that considered alright?

Oh, young Jo. You were so foolish. You had no idea how good those days were.

Now that I'm living in a house that has exactly one source of heat, and it is localized in a room which is not my bedroom, I redact every single whine I've ever whined about being cold in Michigan.

Mom. Dad. This is my formal apology for being a wuss about the temperature in winter. I now know what true fucking cold feels like. Please give me 58 degrees. 58 degrees sounds fucking tropical in comparison right now.

I wasn't even this cold during the polar vortex of doom that the Midwest experienced this last December. It's 21 degrees and sunny outside right now, and I'm pretty sure it's about 29 degrees in my room. My computers battery actually stopped holding a charge WHILE IT WAS PLUGGED IN during the night because it was so cold. I think I've fixed this by dressing Helix (my computers name. Of course I had to give it a name, because god forbid I don't anthropomorphize everything in my life) in flannel shirts, as his battery was still going strong this morning.  My Nook, which is supposed to be able to last for weeks on a single charge, has yet to survive a night without dying. I've been sleeping in long underwear, wrapped up underneath my toasty sleeping bag and two big blankets, yet still my feet and hands are cold.

Ironically, the only time I'm truly warm is when I'm all "Homeless Eskimo Yooper Chic"'d up, and that's of course only when I'm outside.

As you can see through the frosted-on-the-inside glass, it's a blue and sunny day outside! If only it weren't cold as balls in my room!

It's crazy just how much the cold has permeated everything. I've been sitting in front of a burning petchie for a few hours now, even as I type this, and my fingers are little icicles. Copious amounts of tea aren't helping, and no matter how many clothes I pile onto my body still the chill advances.

If this is a prelude to getting sick, it can just stop right now. I refuse to succumb to the crippling illness that almost every other one of my fellow volunteers has contracted. That probably means it's time to go buy lemons to eat and get enough Vitamin C to say fuck off to whatever pathogens feel like attacking my immune system.

Seriously. Pretty sure if I can make it through this winter of no heat, then I can do anything.

The woods behind the house have excellent lighting when the sun is setting.

Unsure what type of pines they are (White, maybe?) but they remind me of Michigan.

Warm, soft light is always really misleading to just how fucking cold it actually is. Your iPhone's quickly depleting battery will remind you,  however, as will the lack of feeling of your face.

And then there are views like this. When the sky is super blue and the trees are all fluffy and big and covered in my favorite type of snow and the mountains are purple. I can sit and complain about how cold I am until I'm blue (and not even from hypothermia, RIMSHOT), but at the end of the day views like this make my stupid little cold heart happy and warm.

Honk If You Collect Baby Doll Heads

Or honk if you are passing someone.

Or honk if there's someone coming towards you.

Or honk if there is a person walking on the road.

Or honk if you're in a wedding caravan.

Basically, honk if you're a Georgian driver doing anything.

One of the first things I noticed about drivers here, other than they're fucking insane, is that everyone honks. Tbilisi is an endless stream of honking, and quite frankly, it was an alarming soundtrack for the city when I arrived initially. It only added fuel to the fire of my opinion that "every single Georgian is a shit driver and hence all of the honking - because they are all doing something stupid constantly." Which isn't fair, I admit it, but coming from a place where most people only honk if others are doing something stupid, I naturally assumed the same about here.

Except it just isn't the case.

I've tried for months to suss out just what it is that people honk about to little, or no, avail, because quite frankly everyone honks about everything.

Folks about to pass you will give you a small warning honk, in case their gut-wrenching tailgating wasn't enough of an indication that they are about to go around you.

Marshrutkas and taxis will honk at people on the side of the road if they're not paying attention, because they could possibly be paying customers and that's not an opportunity to be passed up!

There are instances of people honking when they get cut off, or if someone tries to change lanes with another car in the way, or any of the other reasons for which I'm used to people honking, but they seem few and far between on the Georgian thoroughfares.

Now, I understand all of those. They make sense to me.

The ones that are more abstract are the cases in which cars coming from opposing directions will give a small honk at each other, like an acknowledgment that they're there. Is this the Georgian equivalent of nodding and giving a small wave from the steering wheel that everyone just DOES when encountering another vehicle on a backwoods road in Michigan, only since it's Georgian it has to be louder? It also has no rhyme or reason to it, meaning a driver won't necessarily honk at every single oncoming car. But I have yet to figure out why some deserve a honk and others don't. I've thought that maybe it's because the drivers know one another, but they usually honk from a distance, and since everyone here drives some kind of black Mercedes or BMW or VW, the chances of them being able to identify friends from far away doesn't make sense. So what justifies the discrimination?

My other favorite conundrum is just the single honks drivers send out randomly while on a road alone. It's not around a curve, or a sharp turn, or anything else that would cause some kind of reduced visibility. No. Those all would merit an alert honk. But it's normally in a place where there are no cars anywhere, and no real impending crash zones, so why they feel the need to blast that horn of theirs is beyond me. They might just know something I don't. Maybe it was where there was a car crash years ago because of a herd of cows, so now everyone just honks to discourage any bovine crossings, and it's just become common knowledge that in this part of the road you honk.

This sounds ridiculous, I understand that, but that's kind of how information gets passed along here. For example, one of the most hilarious and/or irritating things about driving in this little country is that when your car is getting fueled up everyone will vacate it and stand a good twenty feet away. When asked why, I'm told it is dangerous to be in the car, and inevitably the Georgians I'm speaking with will make an explosion sound and hand gesture. So basically, the take away of this, is that one time many years ago, someone was smoking while fueling up their car and this, of course, lead to a big ol' ball of fiery gasoline powered inferno. Instead of suggesting that people NOT smoke while fueling up their automobiles - because let's be real, that will just never happen here! - it's much easier to blame it on superstition and that everyone will be much safer if they just stand off to the side since you never know when it'll blow! ....Even though you totally can predict when it will all ignite, but whatever. Georgia.

Anyway, back to honking.

After spending a few weeks in Telavi, and noting many instances of insane honking, I realized why Tbilisi is actually just one large never ending orchestra of car horns.

Weddings.

When you get married, between the church, and other churches you have to visit, and the location of the supra, everyone will get into their cars that are decorated with huge ostentatious ribbons and go careening down the roads, honking merrily all the way. Sometimes people will hang out of windows and shout and wave, and they are totally not discouraged by the ridiculous velocities at which the car is traveling. Nor are any observers remotely concerned about their safety, nor are they even phased by the amount of noise emanating from eighteen cars with whooping Georgians halfway out the windows getting drowned out by the noise of the car horns. They really are something to see. And hear. And there are so many weddings that you quickly become immune to all of the honking that is constantly going on. It's not so noticeable in Tbilisi, since all of the aforementioned reasons for honking on top of weddings are also in play, but in a smaller town like Telavi it's very easy to identify a wedding caravan.

I've honestly stopped noticing them. Or I had, until I went back to the seemingly docile in comparison streets of America for a month and then returned to the ruckus of weddings and taxis and general vehicular dumbassery that is universally worth a good honk. It was slightly jarring again, and I had to readjust myself to Georgian city norm levels of noise.

I'm sure that all the reasons above have legitimate reasons for Georgians. I'm sure a few of them are as obscure as us Americans flashing our headlights at oncoming cars to warn them of a policeman lurking ahead. Yet since I wasn't born into this place, and hold no drivers license of my own (although dear GOD I want one!), and don't even possess the linguistic prowess to ask drivers why they honk at a specific time, let alone understand their answer, I'm left to make my own guesses. And my guess is this - honk if you're a Georgian driver doing anything.

So when you come to Georgia some day, which I know you totally will because I've sold you on this place in the various charming blog posts I've written and you've read, don't be alarmed by the constant stream of car horns. Nothing serious is happening - it's just a way for Georgians to interact. There's absolutely nothing quiet about this group of people, and I love them for it. They're a loud bunch, always yelling or banging things around, or trying to make as much noise as humanly possible with whatever they have at their disposal. The sooner you can come to terms with that, the sooner you will start to feel more comfortable amidst the ensuing chaos of everyday life.

P.s. As to the title of this post, that's an actual bumper sticker available on the Internet. I haven't seen it here or anything, I just Google'd "honk if you..." so I could find something witty to call this write up, and I stumbled upon this gem. You're welcome!

Daily Dose of WTF

I've learned to stop questioning a lot of my day to day routine. 

However.

When there's a space heater on top of the toilet, I really need to ask "why?"

Shit my siblings say #1

On her brother, who is on the computer playing video games and currently preventing her from Facebooking her little heart out, Ani says, "Goga is everything that is wrong with the world."

Pilms!

Telavi has a movie theater! It's in a little nook in the main concert hall in the town center, and you have to go up some pretty shady stairs to get to it. Independently run by a younger guy from Tbilisi, it sports a decent sound system, HD projector, and fairly comfortable tiered seats! In true Georgian fashion, he just torrents whatever he wants to show with Russian subtitles, and voila! A marketable movie for a demographic of bilinguals of Georgian and Russian, also known as this whole country! He's also gotten on the 3D bandwagon and shows movies in 3D.

So tonight, after drinking a few hot toddies and making some kind of awesome pudding dish with my host sister, my friend and I headed up and watched Pacific Rim in 3D and Russian.

I don't care what language it is - gigantic robots fighting insanely huge monsters with a soundtrack of really cheesy heroic music is amazing. Cause I'm an eight year old boy at heart...

Caucasus Cookies!

We got paid yesterday. Naturally, I thought of all the things I could do with this money involving food, so I decided to bake cookies!

After a quick Google search for "baking in the Caucasus region" yielded this recipe, I decided to follow it and see what all it'd taste like!

Sans oatmeal. Cause really, that just gets in the way of chocolate.

Having no real mental scale for what grams are in terms of, well, anything (THANKS STUPID AMERICA), I went ahead and started gathering these materials at the store. Surprisingly, all of them were fairly easy to scrounge up. The hardest part was realizing that the bags of white powder that were next to the salt were, actually, more salt, and not sugar like I thought. It was also amusing to me that the baking powder and vanilla powder were by the coffees and teas instead of the other baking things. Additionally hilarious was that the butter was in a freezer.

Georgian supermarket shenanigans aside, my friend Sophia came over and we started the baking process.

Ingredients!

We chopped up the chocolate bars into little chunks, and then decided that there clearly was not enough chocolate. Not pictured above is another bar of white chocolate, so we threw that in as well. My family doesn't really have a scale or measuring cups, so instead we used a wine glass to measure things, because if there's one thing that every Georgian knows, it's that the wine glasses are 100mg. We decided to double the recipe, and soon realized that the called for amounts were going to yield bizarre cookies. In the end, we put in slightly more flour (per my sisters advice), way less sugar, and a little less butter (maybe. I'm not 100% sure how much butter I even bought, let alone how much we put in, since the package was all in Georgian and was completely devoid of any type of identifiable quantity), but the taste test of the batter confirmed that we were on the right track. The crazy German brown sugar I bought is actually large crystals instead of fine granules. I debated grinding it up, but then forgot to. However, it still tasted normal and delicious, so no harm done.

After sitting in the petchi (wood burning iron stove of amazingness) for less than 10 minutes, the first batch came out. I should mention that we didn't use the actual oven on account of it being full of pots and pans and isn't actually used to prepare food. We, instead, bake with either the crazy Russian Easy Bake oven in the living room, or the lower part of the petchi. Or, like last night, we light a fire in the fireplace and then roast meat over the glowing embers, thus causing the house to smell like pinecones, fire, and barbecued pork. But back to the cookies! Since the pan was super hot, and there was no room to put it on the table, we did the natural thing:

Yeah, that's right. We just put it on the floor.
I fucking love this place.

Ani let me do the honors of taking the cookies off the pan, and even sang me a little celebratory and triumphant tune as she handed me the scraper. Myself, Ani, Sophia, and Goga (my host brother), all armed with cookies, cheers'd one another and took our first bites at the same time.

Please let it be known that I make bomb ass cookies, even with zero measuring and with less than ideal ingredients.

The cookies themselves are slightly more cakelike, almost fluffy in texture. It was weird the first bite, but considering where we are, it's almost fitting. Georgians love cakes. I've had three cakes over the last two weeks in school for various reasons. Even the baked goods here, like their sweet breads, are more akin to cakes instead of bread or American cookie textures. I think it's a part of the result of using baking powder and not baking soda maybe? Unsure, but Ani informed me that these cookies were better than the ones her last American made and really, that's all that matters.

Yum!

Skolashi

After being in the schools for over a month now I think it’s high time for a post on my school that delves a bit more into what’s going on. This is going to be part one, as I doubt I will be able to get everything out of my system without it turning into a novel.

Please note that I have no formal training in education, and that my opinions are all coming based off of having a crappy anthropology degree, as well as being the [successful] result of  crappy American public schools.

I guess the place I should start first off is my schedule. I’ve classes Monday through Friday, with four classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, which are my heaviest work loads. Yes, you heard me. Four classes in one day is the most I work any given week. The rest of the days are either one or two classes. The grades are 1-6, and although TLG strongly encourages us to get into the upper grades (7-12), I’ve elected not to.

Sidenote: I did attend a few of these classes when school first started, but I was way more of a distraction than a help to older kids. Most of them are uninterested about school and their normal teachers to begin with, let alone some random foreigner, and the ones that actually are engaged in class will endlessly hit you with a slew of highly personal questions every.single.class, much to the frustration of your host teacher. I figured it would be better if I just stopped going to these lessons…

So the whole purpose of TLG, and indeed why I am here in Georgia to begin with, is to put native English speakers in English language classrooms around the country. It was a radical new program that began a few years ago by the [at the time of this writing] current president, Mikheil Saakishvili, and it brings in people from America, Canada, and the UK. It’s a pretty great set up, actually. They fly you from your home country to Tbilisi, pay you every month, put you up with a host family that can take care of your dietary needs and creature comforts, give you health insurance and paid vacation, and will also fly you home at the end of your contract.

It used to be that they had two start dates every month, putting the number of foreigners, each month, at 120. Lots of people that did this program were just looking for something to do for a short stint, so they didn’t really invest themselves in the schools or with their families. Some saw it as an opportunity to convert this highly Orthodox country starting when they’re young, and one person was so bold as to actually lock the door of his classroom when his teacher stepped out for a moment and then start preaching his Bible to a whole room of kids. There are horror stories like that riddled throughout the programs history, so it’s no wonder that since last year they’ve cut the number of start dates to two a year and are highly selective with who they bring over. 

Volunteers are not expected, ever, to lead a class, nor teach the students by themselves. Instead, we work with the current English teachers, bringing our Western ideals into the school and helping the kids hear what English is supposed to sound like. When I say "Western ideals," I am basically talking about any type of education method that does not rely on the strictly Soviet style of read-translate-memorize which is so rampant here. 

My two coteachers are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One has been teaching for only a few years, but she's enthusiastic, open to suggestions for activities, lesson plans all the time with me, and has a pretty positive outlook on lessons. The other has been in the teaching business for 47 years. In fact, she had my host dad as a student. While she isn't as super Soviet as other teachers that I've heard of (no corporal punishment, for example!), she never deviates from the read-translate-memorize method I mentioned before. And since she has been teaching for 47 years, and I am her third volunteer, I doubt she's really going to be changing much. Both teachers are technically fluent in English, but their pronunciation of words is highly accented, and there's still a language barrier with them many times. This isn't to say that either of them aren't helpful - they really are, and I'm not trying to bash on them at all. I actually like them a lot, even the older one, who can get slightly terrifying sometimes when she screams in Georgian at the kids. I'm just trying to paint you all a picture of what, and who, I'm working with. 

The books we're using for the early grades are part of a new movement throughout Georgia for teaching English. They're decent enough, and there are a lot of exercises in them that make sense. However, they're ONLY in English. Immersion teaching is awesome and all, but that only works when it's part of a unilateral movement in school and home every single day. Most of my kids have English lessons two or three times a week, with long stretches in between. Added onto that, many times both my coteachers end up speaking mostly in Georgian, and these kids are talking roughly, and this is a very generous estimate, 20 minutes a week in English. Do you know anyone who was able to pick up a language with that little of practice? Cause I don't. 

I can understand for some abstract words, like adjectives and what not, to have a Georgian pairing so the kids can frame the foreign word in their head. However, for vocabulary that has a picture there's zero reason to even think about saying the Georgian word. I've tried to bring this up with my teachers a few times, but they keep reassuring me the students won't understand unless they tell them what it is. I'm skeptical about this, but since I have no idea what they're saying to the kids in class anyway, I'm going along with it for now. Upside is that I'm picking up a lot of vocabulary. I just wish the kids would, too!

The other thing that really bothers me is that these books focus so heavily on reading and writing. There isn't nearly enough practice for the kids to actually speak, which is unfortunate, given that this is where they're really strong. Instead, they’re forced to do the same type of exercises over and over again, never really understanding what it is that they’re saying. One of my coteachers told me the other day that, even in Georgian, kids don’t know what verbs, nouns, or adjectives are. My students are all scraping by based on the examples given in the books instead of freely constructed thoughts. Yet examples aren’t necessarily a guaranteed way to get them to form a sentence since many can’t even copy words down correctly. It’s strange, because they’re not stupid. If I sit there and verbally spell out the words, most of my kids can write them (minus the illiterate ones, of course), but they don’t really put together what the words mean in the overall context of the sentence. I’m going to go ahead and blame this one on inconsistent classes, and having English be the only lessons where the materials are encouraging new types of learning (matching, word banks, fill in the blank, etc) in their otherwise very Soviet style schooling.

So instead of encouraging the kids to speak a lot, and thus actually let them progress quickly through this bullshit language of ours, we bog them down by forcing them to read and write. Most of them don't understand the use of capital letters since Georgian only has one form of their alphabet, so all of their written answers have random capitals thrown in. Classes are full of frustrated students who feel left behind and like they are ultimately hopeless cases. I try to be as positive as I can, and always reinforce kids even TRYING to speak, and they're just now starting to get less shy about yapping at me. Most of them now run up, throw their arms around me in a hug that only a kid can give, and then immediately launch into Georgian at a million miles an hour, giggling when I look confused and say "ar vitsi" ("I don't know"). I'm hoping that this shift means that they'll all start being more involved, and since a few of my more problematic kids have already begun actually doing their homework and volunteering answers, I think we're on the right track. 

Classes are a bit chaotic since speaking out of turn isn't really discouraged. A lot of times lessons are filled with kids talking over each other, or them helping each other out immediately if one is having trouble reading something aloud. It's really cute, actually, and you can see that already in these young ages the cultural dynamics of community and cooperation are instilled. Also, every single kid here would be diagnosed with ADD in the States. And I’m not exaggerating. Even my really awesome kids, who are [mostly] quiet, always do their homework, can recite entire stories at the drop of a hat if you tell them to, would be too “unfocused” and “problematic” in America.  The problem most of the time is the disparity in mastery of the material – a few students per class have it down no problem, some kids are sprinkled in the middle who sort of get it, yet most will fall into the category of not having a clue. The best kids get bored with lessons so they zone out, the worst ones get frustrated by lessons and will just stare into space, and the mid range kids see all their friends being distracted so they, too, become unfocused. And then the teacher screams and stomps her foot, and for a second they’re startled, but nothing really changes. Repeat ad nauseum.

There are no real consequences for bad behavior or not working in class. Grades are sort of given, and while students want high marks their drive to get them is not enough to actually put the work in to earn these. So far we have had one test in my 4^th-6^th grades, and they, for the most part, all failed it. We’re talking scores of 2/40 points failed. Again, it’s not that they’re stupid, because the tests we gave them were straight out of their book, and were all exercises they have been doing for weeks. There’s just zero retention of the material, which is a problem I’ve been trying to tackle but find it challenging when my teachers don’t share the same mindset to sit and drill kids (in fun ways!) until they can answer quickly and accurately. I made flashcards for my first graders for colors, and after two meetings, and two pretty intensive flashcard games, you can bet your ass that those kids can tell you what color your shirt is, and that the leaves on that tree in your yard are green. My one teacher noticed what I was doing with the flashcards, and saw that it actually worked, and has started approaching the alphabet reviews we do in the same way. Even though a few letters still trip them up, these little five year olds are able to identify most characters out of context, and pretty quickly. Being the daughter of a behaviorist, this tickles me.

The only thing that works better than flashcards, however, is Hangman. I never saw my fifth graders try harder than the day we told them if we got through our whole lesson and they understood it that we would play Hangman at the end of class. Everyone was actively engaged, and even my shiest kids were particularly vocal. The best part of it was that after that lesson, they remembered everything from the previous class. They were all smiling, were super happy, and we have yet to have a bad class since this breakthrough. Who knew that bribing some kids with a lousy game of Hangman would ultimately be the proverbial Holy Grail of learning English?

I guess when it comes down to it, bribery really is the way to get what you want out of life.  

This is a page out of my third graders book. I forgot to mention above that while these books fundamentally are decent, they piss me off. The vocabulary that's taught is completely bogus. I think it's outrageous that by third grade, my kids don't know the days of the week, or months of the year, or hell, even ordinal numbers! However, they can tell you all about a space rocket, and Ned the astronaut that lives on a space station. Thanks, dicks.

Normalcy

Today, as I was walking home from school, I saw some men carrying a box down my street. It was really large, made of wood, and had some kind of blue plastic inside it's open top. I quickly put the wooden box, shaped just like a casket, and the inordinately large amount of people in black slowly following it down the street (which is saying something, since this is a country where everyone's primary choice of clothing is black or some shade of grey, and everyone's preferred speed of walking is more of a stroll) together, and realized I was in the middle of a funeral procession. The parade was streaming out of a neighbors gated yard, and while I'm not 100% sure that the box actually was a casket with a body in it, I'm thinking it probably was. Because Georgia.

A lot of little things are starting to feel very normal. Like a restaurant being "nice" because it has a Western toilet, and the fact that all Western toilets here have buttons you push instead of a handle to flush. And that sometimes you need to pour water from a huge trash can acting as a cistern into the toilet since there are water restrictions depending on where you are. If you are grossed out by bathrooms, this is not the country for you. The nicer ones are about on the level of a sleazy diner in the middle of nowhere Midwestville, and the worst are Turkish toilets where there's just a dark hole of smelly grossness staring up at you from the floor.

Also, no soap, so forget about washing your hands, assuming that there's even a sink in said bathroom. And at home, unless some crazy Westerner is doing dishes (a.k.a. me) then you can also rule out having dish soap touch the dishes.

I've even gotten over the preliminary astonishment of no one refrigerating anything except for a certain type of cheese my family brings back from the village. It took some getting used to; coming home from school, looking into a pot of last nights borscht just sitting on the stove, and realizing that it had been sitting there overnight and all through the morning. I was able to skirt around this the first few weeks I was here, since there was an unending supply of cucumbers, tomatoes, cheese and bread. However, now that it's perpetually chilly in the house, I crave warm things. Most of the soups and dishes my mom makes have some kind of meat in them and, being an American who is convinced that I will most likely die of one meat based infection or another (thank you, hyperactive fear mongering media!), this was slightly horrifying. However, in the end, my stomach and good sense won over - this is how my family has been living for years now, and how their families before them were living, too. It didn't kill them, and it wouldn't kill me. I've yet to get the crippling stomach illness that so many other volunteers have been afflicted by, even with drinking weird street water of unknown origin and eating a variety of unrefrigerated meats. However, I'm sure me saying that will just mean that come next week I'll be puking my guts out, because fuck you, Universe.

Even little things, aside from microbes that could potentially prove hazardous to my coddled immune system, are starting to feel normal, like the paper. All of it is A4 sized, and while this may seem like a change that wouldn't take getting used to, having every sheet of loose paper you ever get be just SLIGHTLY longer than what you've grown up with leads to a lot of paper cuts. Thankfully, my hands are finally getting the hang of it. I guess my dexterity modifier is way lower than I thought (rimshot, RPG joke.)!

The various types of cars are becoming more familiar, too, although it's still a little weird to me to see a Jaguar rolling out of the Soviet bloc ghetto. It's been a transition, but it's most Western cars that stand out to me now instead of the Opels and Lada's that kept making me do double takes when I first got here. It's also fun to see familiar names with unfamiliar models. Ford and Nissan both have several cars here that I've never seen stateside, and they look compact and awesome, so I'm unsure why Americans are force fed overly large cars constantly. I suppose that's an entirely different rant, so I'll postpone that diatribe. Also, cars here are making me really mad that I can't buy one of those badass Toyota HiLux trucks unless I get it imported, because whoa are they awesome.
Fun Fact: My Georgian friend the other day told me that in order to get your drivers license here, you HAVE to be able to drive a manual. How cool is that? So everyone on the roads right now is fully capable of driving stick. This for some reason really amuses me, probably because I can only name a handful of people back home who can. My major gripe with this program is that I'm contractually forbidden from driving. I think when my term is done (hopefully next spring, unless they decide to not renew my contract, in which case I will cry, kill myself, and then go rent a car immediately and take it on crazy mountain roads) the first thing I'm going to do is rent a car and drive cross country. There are WAY too many awesome little side roads that I have no idea where their destination is, but I'm pretty sure me and a sturdy little 4x4 could find out what's down them. 

Life feels normal while being highly surreal. I'm finally used to the mountains over to the east constantly looking majestic, but I still smile every time I see them. And even though I've been eating fruit since Gerber's was making my mother shove it down my throat, I'm still not to be trusted around most fruit types here after the great fig fiasco a few weeks ago. It's basically like I'm a young child again, relearning all the universal truths of the world around her. Also, like a child, it's super difficult to articulate what all I'm thinking and want, since I lack the vocabulary for it. Georgian, with it's crazy infixes and postpositions, is really tripping me up. Slowly but surely, though. It's just a strange feeling to be 26 years old, and treated like I'm 23 years younger.

Here are some more pictures. I'm taking a lot, actually, but I'm finding that most of them don't do this place any sort of justice. I just reached over 2,000 pictures in my Georgia album in Aperture, and looking through them is a really big disappointment. However, that apparently won't deter me from posting them for your viewing pleasure.

Every single domicile I've been to so far has a super creepy contingent of stuffed animals in the living room. No clue why. Most of them are sold, second hand, at the bazaar. The amount of ridiculously scary dolls here is off the charts. Thankfully, none of them are in my house, and neither is Tranny Pony. Although there are two chairs outside of my room with giant stuffed gorillas sitting in them, and at night I sometimes forget they're there and I get a little startled when emerging from my room into the dimly lit upstairs common area and seeing two shadows just hanging out, waiting...

This thing is my most favorite appliance, possibly ever. It's our water heater, and you turn it on with a switch on the wall to the right (out of frame). It's ridiculously efficient, and gets water up to scalding within a minute or so. That being said, it's also partially electric, so if the electricity flickers when you're mid shower, you're kind of SOL on having warm water for the remaining time you're getting clean. This unfortunate truth leads to my showers being biweekly. Surprisingly, my hair has started to adjust. Normally it gets disgusting in a day, but now that it's learned it can either be smothered to death with baby powder, or just not get ridiculously oily, it's cut the crap. I can maintain a clean looking head of hair for up to four days now! Go you, hormones!
And in case you were wondering, yes. I was just bragging about how infrequently I bathe. What of it?

Previously mentioned Soviet bloc apartments. These start on the main road just by the bazaar, and continue down the large hill Telavi is built on. They're in pretty rough shape, most having not been updated since the 1950's when they were built. However, there's something strangely beautiful about them. As they are almost all owned by their residents, each apartments balcony is a little bit different - painted, unique railings, custom windows, laundry of various colors, frilly plants. A few have even bricked off the balcony to create a whole new room for their living space. It's really incredible to see such disregard for order and sameness that the Russians were striving for when they built these. Also, they've got a great view. 

I love how this is now a normal sight. Forget about the medieval fortress being something I see daily, but add onto it the weirdness of new buildings that look super European, and janky ass Lada Niva's around, PLUS a rainbow? I mean, it's awesome, but I still have a hard time remembering that this is my life sometimes.

I'm starting to get a feel for the mountains. We've had a long streak of very calm days this last week, with no usual howling wind at night. This means it's been incredibly hazy, and these clouds have been covering the back range of the Caucasus mountains. Normally, if it's windy at night, the mountains are crisp and clear for miles and miles back, with no clouds forming over them. As you can see, that was not the case when I took this, and since they also look incredible during magic hour, I hauled ass up behind the house into the scary ass Wolf Woods (I'm calling them that now since my host sister told me she has seen wolves in them. We can forget the fact that she also said they had red eyes, because that makes it sound like they're not real, but I'm sure they're back there, on account of us living on the edge of town, and these woods being part of the larger forest that spreads up into the middle range that runs through Kakheti.) to try to get a picture of them. This is the best I have, and it so does not do the incredible clouds any sort of kindness.
Also, speaking of incredible clouds! The other day I saw a few lenticular clouds just starting to form! Naturally it was when it was getting dark, and my iPhone's sensor just wasn't having any of it. That's what I get for leaving the Nikon at home that one time.

I don't understand why pomegranates haven't been a part of my fall life up until now, but moving forward they will certainly have to be. This one was sitting on a table that was overflowing with free grapes, apples, persimmons, and pomegranates last Saturday at a music and crafts festival in one of the parks in Telavi. Having my swiss army knife, and being able to whip it out in public with no one freaking out, is pretty awesome, and I'm fairly certain I'm going to end up in trouble when I come back to America and bust it out cause I want to dig into some tasty fruit.

In that same park here in town, there is a little amusement rides area. It has some bumper cars, a small roller coaster with a wine theme (naturally), a few other rides that you'd find at one of those traveling carnivals, and this carousel. Please note the gratuitous amounts of Disney and Harry Potter characters adorning it. All the panels on this are full of unlicensed intellectual property belonging to the major studios, and it is awesome. Actually, that's true of most of Georgia. Knock off Disney princesses are in most store fronts that cater to children, and many notebooks for students have some kind of character from these franchises on them. They look real, but are just SLIGHTLY different, and I've become so inundated with false Disney characters the last month and a half that I don't even notice they're fake now. Which is saying a lot, considering how much time I spent at Disneyland while living in California.

Another ride in the park. Please note creepy Winny the Poo, sitting on Manic Murdering Tommy the Train's face. I'm fairly certain that this thing actually embarks to Hell every night, although I don't have the evidence to back this claim up. But seriously. Look at that and tell me it's not evil.
 I'm really a fan of these little "commy fun parks" (coined by my sister, and pretty accurate!), and their goofy aesthetics. The park on top of the mountain in Tbilisi is full of stuff like this, as were the various seaside spaces in Batumi. 

The biggest thing that's become normal, however, is that food is always getting in the way of other plans.